Madame Louise Calment

On May 29, as England began preparing for the annual June tournaments—the only outdoor sports in which all Great Britain was scheduled to compete (at Chope Park, the site of Queen Mary’s elaborate game room on her wedding day) between 1536 and 2005—the capital was set ablaze. Oxford, one of the most intensely sectarian cities in the country, was left in a wild turmoil that caused local officials to have to call an emergency meeting: a firestorm known as "The Greatest Fireworks Display that has Ever Been Called in All England." It was the most magnificent conflagration ever to be seen.

In the long summer evening of May 31, everyone woke up to the sound of church bells and hymns and celebrations. They heard that St. Edmund had been restored and that Henry VIII had replaced his “base” uncle who had debilitated him through his incessant and corrosive lifestyle. But then Thomas Streatley, in whose name the display would be organized, published a strange press statement in which he could still express the view that Edward’s reign was “about to terminate” while at the same time he continued to exist as the “man and ruler” who was loved by “the greatest people in the world.” And in the days that followed the specter of “Streatley’s return, there were many reactions to his death. Some predicted that this would lead to a much-needed peace with France, others that it would lead to anarchy. The new king, therefore, tried to pacify everyone in London with unprecedented military victories around London in the summer of 1534. It seemed like he would be able to finish the job he began all too soon and restore all his old glory.

Chope Park was burning. A hundred villages and hamlets were being buried.

But the grand display was not over. Royal messengers were sent to every other English city as well as to Germany, Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, Portugal, Vienna, Prague, Padua, Lausanne (Swiss), Modena, Flanders, Marseilles, Basle, Nijmegen, Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, and Florence; even to Scotland, where Charles Douglas was born in 1516 and where he had been held prisoner for two years after his parents died.